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Sunday, October 26, 2003

A lesson from the opposition.

Here's an insight that the politically-mobilized Evangelical movement learned through trial and error — and that religious liberals should take to heart — even if there's a healthy dollop of spin in it:

"Evangelicals today are more interested in making a difference than in making a statement," said the Rev. Richard Cizik, the vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 43,000 congregations. "We made a lot of statements in the 1980's and got zip."

Mr. Cizik said that evangelicals were now more willing to work with Jewish and feminist groups on certain foreign policy issues [like slavery, "human trafficking," and AIDS] and that the failure of evangelicals in the 1980's to meet their goals was in part a failure to collaborate. "Evangelicals have thought historically, 'Well, we'll do politics the way we do faith — we'll just convert the opposition,' " he said. "But you can't do politics the same way you do religion."